Friday, December 05, 2014

Researchgate is spam. Don't sign up for it.

I got an e-mail purporting to be an invitation to sign up for researchgate, which is an academia.edu type thing. So I went ahead and filled it out and clicked on my papers so they would show up.

Today people that I've co-written are getting e-mails saying that I invited them to sign up for researchgate. This is false. Please don't sign up for it. I should have read the wikipedia page, which ends in the following:

ResearchGate has been criticized for emailing unsolicited invitations to the coauthors of its users.[16] These emails are written as if they were personally sent by the user, but they are sent automatically unless the user opts out,[17] which causes some researchers to boycott the service because of this marketing tactic.[18] A study published by the Association for Information Systems found that a dormant account on ResearchGate, using default settings, generated 297 invitations to 38 people over a 16 month period, and that the user profile was automatically attributed to more than 430 publications.[17] Furthermore, journalists and researchers have found that the "RG score," calculated by ResearchGate via a proprietary algorithm,[17] can reach high values under questionable circumstances.[17][19]

On their help page they say that they will delete your account if you e-mail them and ask. I'll report back if they actually do this.

Comments

I got an e-mail purporting to be an invitation to sign up for researchgate, which is an academia.edu type thing. So I went ahead and filled it out and clicked on my papers so they would show up.

Today people that I've co-written are getting e-mails saying that I invited them to sign up for researchgate. This is false. Please don't sign up for it. I should have read the wikipedia page, which ends in the following:

ResearchGate has been criticized for emailing unsolicited invitations to the coauthors of its users.[16] These emails are written as if they were personally sent by the user, but they are sent automatically unless the user opts out,[17] which causes some researchers to boycott the service because of this marketing tactic.[18] A study published by the Association for Information Systems found that a dormant account on ResearchGate, using default settings, generated 297 invitations to 38 people over a 16 month period, and that the user profile was automatically attributed to more than 430 publications.[17] Furthermore, journalists and researchers have found that the "RG score," calculated by ResearchGate via a proprietary algorithm,[17] can reach high values under questionable circumstances.[17][19]

On their help page they say that they will delete your account if you e-mail them and ask. I'll report back if they actually do this.